100 Years of Conflict

By Dalia Acosta, IPS, 11 February 1998

HAVANA, Feb 11 (IPS) - Mystery still surrounds the sinking of the
U.S. Maine, which served as a pretext 100 years ago for the United
States to intervene in Cuba's war of independence and take over
the island.

Just after 9:40 PM on Tuesday Feb. 15, 1898, the battleship was
sunk in the Bay of Havana, and three-fourths of its 354 crew-
members were killed.

According to historians, the Maine reached Havana on Jan. 25 on
a "friendly visit" just when the United States and Spain were
caught up in tension over Cuba.

"Its presence was just one more in a chain of pressures that
the U.S. government had been exercising over Spain," researcher
Gustavo Placer Cervera wrote in "the Explosion of the Maine, a
Still Open Debate' in the weekly 'Workers', the publication of
Cuba's central union.

The presence of the biggest battleship that had ever anchored
in the bay "clearly constituted preparations for intervention in
the war that the Cubans were successfully waging against the
Spanish colonial regime," added Cervera, a former navy officer.

There had been many attempts to take possession of Cuba since
President Thomas Jefferson said on Oct. 20, 1805 that "as the key
to the Gulf, the possession of the Island is indispensable for the
defense of Louisiana and Florida."

The United States put forth a number of proposals to buy the
island, from Jefferson's offer to the king and queen of Spain to
the last bid a few days before the declaration of war between the
two countries in April 1898.

One clear reason for Washington's interest in Cuba was the
dependence of the island's economy on the United States, which by
1860 already absorbed 62 percent of Cuba's exports, against a mere
three percent that went to Spain.

On Sep. 23, 1897, Theodore Roosevelt, then under-secretary of
the U.S. navy, said Spain would be unable to pacify Cuba, and
added that he was confident that events would soon justify U.S.
intervention.

U.S. policy towards the war between Cuba and Spain was defined
by Roosevelt on Dec. 24, 1897, when he said his country would back
the weakest against the strongest, even if that meant "the
complete extermination of both, in order to annex the Pearl of the
West Indies."

The United States at last found a pretext to intervene, the
sinking of the Maine, when the press and the hawks in the United
States called for U.S. involvement in the war, blaming the
disaster on Madrid and Havana.

"Spain was not even able to guarantee the security of a U.S.
battleship that was visiting Havana on a peaceful mission," said
President McKinley in his request to Congress to put an end to the
war in Cuba.

Cervera writes that Washington denied that the explosion was
internal, as concluded by the Spanish investigative commission
created two days after the disaster. Washington refused to
participate in a mixed commission.

Presided over by navy Captain William T. Sampson, the U.S.
commission determined that the warship was destroyed by a small
external explosion which set off an enormous internal explosion.

The most serious attack on that theory came from an English
expert on mines, John T. Bucknill, who wrote in the specialised
British newspaper 'Engineer' that the most probable cause was
spontaneous combustion in the ship's coal furnace, "a frequent
occurrence in vessels of that era."

The controversy is still raging today. In his book on the
destruction of the Maine, U.S. Admiral Hymar G. Rickover concludes
that the explosion was internal, caused by a fire in a coal
furnace. Others, like his fellow countryman Thomas Aller, argue
that the explosion was external.

Spanish journalist Agustin Remesal revealed in his recent book
"The Enigma of the Maine" that the U.S. navy considered the
hypothesis of a self-induced attack and investigated John Blandin,
officer of the ship's guard on the night of the disaster.

Cervera, meanwhile, says the Cubans were not responsible for
the attack, arguing that "the aim of their struggle was
independence from Spain, not U.S. intervention, which in practice
meant a change of ownership."

The former navy officer denies that Cuba's independence
fighters used terrorist tactics, and questions the logic of mining
a battleship from a country that was supposedly an ally.

An external explosion, although theoretically possible, was
impractical, he reasons, while tending towards the hypothesis of
an internal explosion, either accidental or deliberate.

Cervera does not rule out the possibility of a deliberate
internal explosion, "given the interest of the most aggressive
U.S. imperialist circles in launching the country into the war."

But he does not go so far as to offer a definitive conclusion
on the event that led the United States to enter the war in which
Spain lost its last colonies, Cuba and the Philippines.

The United States governed Cuba from 1899 to 1902, when a
constitution that included the so-called Platt Amendment went into
effect. That amendment recognised the right of the U.S. armed
forces to intervene in Cuba and retain - up to today - the
Guantanamo military base.

The United States resorted to that right to intervene on
several occasions, after which it deployed marines in Cuba for
extended periods of time. For example, the United States threw its
support behind Colonel Fulgencio Batista, a key figure in a
turbulent period that began with President Ramon Grau San Martin's
resignation in 1933.

Batista staged another coup on Mar. 10, 1952, which led to a
dictatorship that cost 20,000 Cuban lives up to the Dec. 31, 1958
victory of the revolution by Fidel Castro's guerrillas.

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